The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,45

is me, as he watched his dagger begin to spin towards the bottom. He was drowning.

The creature blew out its breath and Tycho felt them both sink after the dagger, following it towards the gravel below. The air in his own lungs was gone. He should be dead or already dying but all he felt was numb.

A numbness as bad as that he’d felt the night rip tides caught him in the Venetian lagoon and dragged him under. Finally depositing him on the stone steps at Rialto for a young street rat called Rosalyn to find. She’d thought him already dead and maybe she was right. Who would find him this time? Always assuming this winter ended and the ice melted, and this wasn’t the end of the world as more than half the people in Europe claimed. Feeling the creature wrap its arms more tightly around him, Tycho watched it smile as if reading his thoughts.

The lake was darker here but the water warmer, as if some of the last summer’s heat had survived. Maybe there was simply a warm spring venting somewhere near, or perhaps he imagined it. The water felt warmer the deeper he was dragged. A normal person would be dead by now, drowned when the last of his breath went skyward in tiny bubbles. Only he wasn’t normal, was he? And here was his proof. He was alive when he should be dead.

Fed up with waiting, the creature dragged him close and tried to squeeze air from his lungs. A splatter of bubbles was all Tycho had left. The thing looked worried now, its face less obviously Tycho’s own. In dragging Tycho close, it had given him the opening he’d lacked.

My turn, Tycho decided.

Opening his mouth, he bit into the creature’s neck and ripped, sour blood mixing with lake water in his mouth. He clung on, gripping tight with the last of his strength as the creature tried to push free, and bit again, spitting flesh into the water. All the while it bled and struggled, and bled some more, until finally it stopped struggling. Tycho held it until it stopped shuddering and then he released it and watched its corpse float gently away, carried by the rising thermal of the hot spring. In death it reverted to its natural form, looking as Tycho first saw it, like a cross between a frog and a dwarf, with needle teeth and webs between its fingers.

The world was roofed in ice. Thick and dark. As strangely jagged and cruel on the underside as it had been marble-smooth on top. If this was the way the world ended, here was where he would remain, locked on the wrong side of an ice wall.

I’ve failed Giulietta. It was a bad thought to carry for eternity.

Gripping the underside of the ice, Tycho dragged himself in one direction, ice slicing his fingers, until he decided he should have reached the makeshift moat by now if he was going to reach it at all, and began pulling himself in the opposite direction. Except how did he know which was right? The strength the creature’s blood had given him was going, leaching away into the water. And he faced a deeper fear. What would happen when the sun came up?

All that light through the ice. Would it burn him?

He suspected it might. He’d failed Giulietta, and the sun would fry him through the ice if he didn’t free himself soon. Kicking off from the ice, Tycho hit the bottom and crawled on his hands and knees until he reached an incline. The island had to be up ahead, which meant somewhere above was a circle of fine ice or dark water that made up Alonzo’s makeshift moat.

He found it eventually, a crackle of ice thin as leaves and brittle as the skim on a puddle, so inconsequential he barely noticed it as he broke through and gasped air, feeling his lungs fill and his heart restart. Above him the sky was high and clear, and the moon bright enough to show him he was back at the moat’s outer edge.

Fingers clawing ice, he fought for a grip, found one and dragged himself on to its surface, only for something to grab his ankle before he could fight free of the water. Two things happened at once. Long webbed fingers tightened their grip and began to drag him back, and what he’d thought was a mound of snow reared up, hurtled across open ice