The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,74
wolf on the far side, too frozen to stink and too starved to count as food. He kept climbing, the scree beneath his feet glued in place by ice and sharp as running on razors. The fort would provide immediate protection. Longer term, something better would be needed.
The fort had too many rooms and too many ways in for him to keep Leo safe from stray arrows, thrown knives and swinging swords. Because the responsibility of keeping Leo safe terrified him. He’d survived wounds that killed others. But Leo . . .? Only Leo’s whimpers told him the child was still alive.
What you love makes you weak.
He understood Atilo’s maxim now. Only people like Giulietta believed that what you loved made you strong. The thought almost stopped Tycho in his tracks before common sense and a stray arrow had him scrabbling the last few paces to throw himself through the fort door and barge it shut behind him, hinges screaming with ice and rust. Clumsily, he lifted an iron crossbar from the dirt, losing skin from his fingers to the frost as he dropped it into place.
Roderigo’s men would have to force the door, scale the walls or clamber through an upper window, those being the only windows there were. Racing up the guard stairs, Tycho stepped on to the windswept battlements and took his first clear look at the men who’d been tracking him for two days. A hundred wild-haired archers, two renegade Crucifers and Lord Roderigo.
Roderigo’s mount was struggling up the final slope, torn between fear of the icy scree under its hooves and its master’s flailing whip. His two lieutenants were having equal trouble. Only the archers moved fluidly. Streaming between boulders and flowing over the scree as if born from wolves and raised in the snow.
“Up there,” Roderigo cried.
Tycho had run at night and hidden in the day, and his pursuers had used the dead time to catch up, tracking him easily. A fresh fall of snow had sealed his fate. Even with the finest Assassini skills, it was impossible for a limping man to carry a child across virgin snow without leaving tracks. And the scree, the slope, and fear of hurting Leo, stopped him running as fast as he wanted.
What you love makes you weaker.
The previous night he doubled back to kill the man he thought their tracker, having left Leo under the shelter of a rock. He swirled out of the darkness in the seconds of safety offered by a cloud and sprayed blood across snow without even stopping to feed. He’d swerved, jinked and danced his way back to the treeline as arrows followed. It made no difference. Tonight, he woke to smell horses on the wind and hear the distant jangle of bridles.
“Sorry about that,” he told the infant.
It snivelled and whimpered and he wondered how cold it could get without dying. The fact it was blue was a bad sign. Leo, he thought. Not it. Leo, Giulietta’s son. The reason he stood here while they scurried below. Without a ram or wood to start a fire the gate would hold them until Roderigo lost patience and ordered his men to scale the walls or climb the valley’s end and try to enter that way.
But first, it seemed, Roderigo intended to try talking.
A makeshift white flag was being raised and Roderigo spurred his mount forward under its protection, his lieutenants slightly behind and to either side like a double shadow. “Surrender the child,” Roderigo shouted.
Tycho remained silent.
“Princess Maria told us of your brutality.”
I let her live, Tycho thought. She gagged Leo on the voyage and I let her live. Where was the brutality in that?
“His highness offers you a fair trial in return for his son’s safe return.”
The wind whipped and the white flag snapped, and Tycho used the seconds to count the archers and examine the killing ground in front of the fort.
“Are you really such a monster?” Roderigo shouted.
Depends how you look at it.
Everything always depended on how you looked at it. Tycho didn’t doubt Alonzo thought himself the hero, and Roderigo thought himself the hero’s faithful captain. Leaving Roderigo standing there, Tycho carried Leo below and began putting together the two parts of his plan. “Do you like the idea? he asked the infant.
It snivelled. That was pretty much its answer to everything.
“I’ll take that as a yes. I don’t suppose you’d like to help me move this?”