The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,70

blade sideways.

Atilo’s last words had been a lesson.

Tycho stripped Leo, wrapped him in a fur and tied it tight with a ribbon ripped from Maria’s dress. “Here we go,” he told the child, before preparing to lash the bundle to his back. Leo just stared at him. Crouching carefully on the window sill, Tycho yanked the strip of cloth to unroll the wall hanging. Nothing says magic like a locked room. Another of Atilo’s maxims.

A body in a locked room creates fear. Just as something stolen from a room still locked suggests a demon is involved and no further investigation is needed or wise. Although Tycho would not achieve that he hoped to unsettle Alonzo’s followers. Time to move. Feeling with his toes, he found a gap between staves and braced, then lowered himself slowly over the edge. As Tycho did a shadow raced out of the darkness and hit hard, trying to knock him from the wall. Long fingers reaching for his eyes, legs hooked around him to double his weight.

Domovoi.

He tasted blood fouler than sewage. The shadow howled in his ear and its thumb half found Tycho’s eye socket, pressing until the night sky exploded. Tycho spat finger to the dirt below. Leo’s terrified wail gave the creature new focus.

“No you fucking don’t.”

Long fingers grasped for the bundle on Tycho’s back. Still hanging one-handed from the sill, he grabbed the thing’s wrist and bit to the bone, chewing sinew and ripping arteries that spat foul-tasting blood. Up close, the domovoi stank. Scales covered its body and its face was reptilian, the eyes cold and lidless. As thin lips drew back to reveal needle teeth, Tycho smashed his elbow into its mouth, breaking teeth and ripping his flesh. It jerked back, and he dropped his hand to his dagger, unsheathing it and driving it into the creature’s side.

He twisted the blade viciously. The domovoi wailed, unlocked its legs and tried fighting free. But Tycho simply ripped his dagger from its side and cut its throat, watching it fall away into darkness and thud to the dirt below.

The shadows around him quivered in outrage.

What he thought was darkness began to flow towards him from all directions as dozen of domovoi descended on him, drawn by their fellow’s death and Leo’s thin cry. In the few seconds before they struck, he thought of Giulietta and felt only despair at failing her so completely.

30

“You loved your aunt?”

For once the new Regent didn’t say the first thing that came into her head, or what she thought Frederick wanted to hear, or even what she thought Frederick didn’t want to hear simply because she was feeling difficult.

“And feared her,” Giulietta admitted.

Frederick waited. He was like Leopold in that. Leopold regularly outwaited her, looking thoughtful and considerate, as if simply waiting politely. With Leopold you knew it was intentional. It was never quite manipulation. All the same, Leopold could lighten her mood with a kind word or force a quarrel with a cruel one. Frederick seemed less calculating.

She was comparing the half-brothers a lot these days. Maybe it was that they shared smiles and a dancing, slightly dangerous laughter in their eyes. She loved Tycho. But each day made her more grateful for Frederick’s companionship in a world shrunk by ice to a window seat in a passageway, with doors at both ends and a unicorn tapestry. And if she was cold, hiding here with her braziers and her glass windows and wood panelling, how were the rest of the city coping, huddled in their own frozen, tiny worlds? They must be even colder. Although she wasn’t sure that was possible. She was to-the-bone cold, cold to her soul, and Frederick was her warmth in the wilderness. There, she’d dared think it.

“If you haven’t lost someone close to you . . .” She flushed, feeling mortified when he touched her hand to say it was all right. Of course he’d lost someone close to him. He’d lost his wife and his child, and she’d done what she promised herself she’d stop doing – speaking without thinking.

“It’s all right,” he insisted.

“I shouldn’t be so bloody thoughtless . . .”

“You’re not.” He smiled. “If anything, you think too much.” He pulled a deeply serious face, and smiled when she did. “That’s more like it.” Slicking condensation from the window with his finger, he wiped it on his doublet. The world beyond was as white as it had been the day before, and the day before that. The