The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,8
usually right about these things.” At that, the tailor’s mouth fell open again. “The duke is much better these days,” Tycho explained, addressing the tailor directly. “The fever he had this summer brought back his senses . . .”
The fever had been poisoning, and Marco’s senses had always been there, hidden behind the twitches and the drooling. Only his stuttering had been real and that was nothing like as bad as everyone thought. Marco’s idiocy had been a disguise to protect him from his uncle. Only Tycho and Giulietta knew this. But it wouldn’t hurt if the city began to believe Marco was returning to his senses. With his uncle effectively banished and his mother’s party stronger than before, now would be a good time for the people to begin trusting him.
“My lord. How soon do you want the outfit?”
“By nightfall tomorrow.”
The tailor opened his mouth to protest and shut it. He bowed to Tycho, bowed lower to Lady Giulietta and backed out of the room. A minute later Tycho saw him cross the inner courtyard for the Porta della Carta and say something to the guard who unbolted the smaller door and let him out on to the Piazza San Marco. He’d been escorted to the palace but could find his own way home.
By dawn a layer of snow dusted the piazza’s herringbone brick, except around the edge where the boots of the Night Watch had ground it to grey slush. The morning crowd would have done the same to the square if the snow hadn’t kept falling. It fell through the morning into the afternoon. It was still falling when darkness set in. At no time did the sun shine warmly enough to melt the snow. When the tailor returned, Tycho had just woken from dreamless sleep to find the Piazza San Marco blanketed white.
“This is good,” Tycho said.
The tailor bowed himself from the room, still smiling in grateful relief. He’d cut the doublet in the latest style to end halfway down Tycho’s hip and not quite cover the padded cod at the front. With the doublet came white hose and a cloak lined with pale grey silk. The grey and white would mimic snow and shadow for anyone who saw him pass. Not that Tycho expected to be seen.
“Sweet dreams,” he told Giulietta, who stirred, and smiled at his kiss; her forehead tasting of salt and rosewater. At the edge of the Molo, which was the little terrace in front of the ducal palace, Tycho discarded the black cloak he’d worn to leave the palace and tucked it behind a statue where it was unlikely to be found, then unfolded the white cloak he carried beneath.
A second later he’d vanished.
White against white and grey against stone, he owned the shadows and they loved him as he flowed along the cold expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni and turned north out of the wind, taking an alley full of overhanging houses so close they kissed. He chose a route that took him north and let him curl back towards the great houses above Ponte Maggiore. Here Lord Dolphini lived, and Prince Alonzo now slept, in a palace rebuilt and renovated until it was grander than its neighbours.
Tycho stepped into a doorway to let the Night Watch stamp past, their teeth chattering in the cold and their words reduced to sullen and unhappy grunts of disgust. They left a trail of footprints a blind man could follow. Tycho used their tracks for the next half-mile. He was going to kill Alonzo without Alexa’s blessing and against her orders. This way no one could hold her responsible.
Two floors up, third window along.
That was where he’d seen Maria Dolphini stare out the night before. Rolling himself over a balustrade crusted with snow, Tycho slid his dagger between the shutters and lifted the latch. Someone had nailed a blanket against the cold over the window beyond and he opened the window and lifted the blanket aside.
Alonzo’s room was in near darkness, with only the sullen glow of almost dead embers in a wide fireplace to light it. His bed was huge and curtained. Tycho imagined the biggest of the guest chambers had been given over to Alonzo and his bride. The room looked too self-importantly grand to be Maria’s own. When a board shifted slightly under his feet, he froze, listening for any change in the faint snoring that came from beyond the curtains. Alonzo slept heavily but Maria’s breathing was light