Read Online The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini by Jon Courtenay Grimwood - Free Book Online
Authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
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thousand ghosts plucked at the shadows’ edge. Here princes and statesmen had lain before they were buried. Because the ground was frozen hard and the attack on Leo was a secret, here lay a small child and the nurse who’d been looking after him.
Ice slicked the wall in a pottery glaze that made the walls look natural, not something built by man. The sluggish water around the island city was gelid, the canals snaking through its heart colder still. Old women were insisting the canals might freeze. It had happened before when they were children. Touching his fingers to the wall, Tycho believed it could happen again.
In a year when the world turned colder, and canals froze in Venice, blizzards smothered a town beyond a huge ocean no dragonship had crossed for more than a hundred years . . .
Tycho muttered the words so softly they might have been a prayer for the two cloth-covered bodies on slabs in front of him. They came from a book by Sir John Mandeville’s squire; a man who travelled to the world’s strangest places, where the dead walked and dragons lived and serpents spoke. It was the story of Bjornvin’s fall. The last battle of the Far West Warriors, the Viking conquerors of Vineland, whom Tycho remembered as drunken scum. But he’d been their slave, from a people far older, so he was hardly likely to remember them fondly.
The blizzard almost buried the woman approaching the gates of the last Viking settlement in Vineland. She had walked an ice bridge from Asia. Not this winter. Not even the one before.
She was at Bjornvin’s walls before the gate slave saw her. His orders were to admit no one. He would have obeyed, too. But she raised an angelic face framed by black hair. Even at that distance he could see she had amber-flecked eyes.
Without intending, he descended the ladder from the walls, removed the crossbar from the gate and opened it . . .
It was the amber-flecked eyes that made Tycho suspect the woman was his mother. The gate slave who descended the walls was his foster-father. Tycho could remember Bjornvin falling. He was the reason the town fell. He’d not been called Tycho then. He had no idea what he’d been called.
Thorns and wild roses probably grew over its remains; at least he hoped they did. The caribou, foxes and hares would have returned. He doubted even Bjornvin’s red-painted enemy, the Skaelingar, remembered it had existed.
Leo’s nurse and the dead infant lay under grave sheets on marble slabs that looked like cuts of some fatty meat. He could smell corruption in the air, so faint a trace he doubted anyone else could do the same. It was the corruption he’d expect from a corpse an hour or so dead. Alexa must have had them carried down here quickly. The cold had done the rest.
Pulling back the sheet revealed the naked body of a woman in her middle twenties. Her limbs were frozen as if rigor had set and remained rather than eased as it did naturally. Her skin had the sheen of glass and her flesh the translucence of alabaster. But nothing could make pretty the cut that revealed an icy twist of gut. He found what he wanted below her left teat.
A dagger wound. The blow was perfect.
The blade had slid between ribs and ruptured her heart
. A blow so neat and a gut wound so brutal?
Bending closer, Tycho found a twist of thread in the stab wound and blew on frozen flesh to free it. Red wool from an overgown, bloodied flax from an undergown beneath. The rip to her gut had no threads and its edges were bloodless and too straight. The original blow had bled her out and eventually killed her. The second was for show. She was already mortally wounded before the second cut was made . . .
“
That way madness lies
.”
“Your highness . . .” Tycho hastily covered the corpse.
Thin as a stick insect and gangly as a spider, Duke Marco stood in the doorway dressed in black. In his hand was a church candle. His doublet could have been Tycho’s own. “P-pretty angel,” Marco said,
Ice slicked the wall in a pottery glaze that made the walls look natural, not something built by man. The sluggish water around the island city was gelid, the canals snaking through its heart colder still. Old women were insisting the canals might freeze. It had happened before when they were children. Touching his fingers to the wall, Tycho believed it could happen again.
In a year when the world turned colder, and canals froze in Venice, blizzards smothered a town beyond a huge ocean no dragonship had crossed for more than a hundred years . . .
Tycho muttered the words so softly they might have been a prayer for the two cloth-covered bodies on slabs in front of him. They came from a book by Sir John Mandeville’s squire; a man who travelled to the world’s strangest places, where the dead walked and dragons lived and serpents spoke. It was the story of Bjornvin’s fall. The last battle of the Far West Warriors, the Viking conquerors of Vineland, whom Tycho remembered as drunken scum. But he’d been their slave, from a people far older, so he was hardly likely to remember them fondly.
The blizzard almost buried the woman approaching the gates of the last Viking settlement in Vineland. She had walked an ice bridge from Asia. Not this winter. Not even the one before.
She was at Bjornvin’s walls before the gate slave saw her. His orders were to admit no one. He would have obeyed, too. But she raised an angelic face framed by black hair. Even at that distance he could see she had amber-flecked eyes.
Without intending, he descended the ladder from the walls, removed the crossbar from the gate and opened it . . .
It was the amber-flecked eyes that made Tycho suspect the woman was his mother. The gate slave who descended the walls was his foster-father. Tycho could remember Bjornvin falling. He was the reason the town fell. He’d not been called Tycho then. He had no idea what he’d been called.
Thorns and wild roses probably grew over its remains; at least he hoped they did. The caribou, foxes and hares would have returned. He doubted even Bjornvin’s red-painted enemy, the Skaelingar, remembered it had existed.
Leo’s nurse and the dead infant lay under grave sheets on marble slabs that looked like cuts of some fatty meat. He could smell corruption in the air, so faint a trace he doubted anyone else could do the same. It was the corruption he’d expect from a corpse an hour or so dead. Alexa must have had them carried down here quickly. The cold had done the rest.
Pulling back the sheet revealed the naked body of a woman in her middle twenties. Her limbs were frozen as if rigor had set and remained rather than eased as it did naturally. Her skin had the sheen of glass and her flesh the translucence of alabaster. But nothing could make pretty the cut that revealed an icy twist of gut. He found what he wanted below her left teat.
A dagger wound. The blow was perfect.
The blade had slid between ribs and ruptured her heart
. A blow so neat and a gut wound so brutal?
Bending closer, Tycho found a twist of thread in the stab wound and blew on frozen flesh to free it. Red wool from an overgown, bloodied flax from an undergown beneath. The rip to her gut had no threads and its edges were bloodless and too straight. The original blow had bled her out and eventually killed her. The second was for show. She was already mortally wounded before the second cut was made . . .
“
That way madness lies
.”
“Your highness . . .” Tycho hastily covered the corpse.
Thin as a stick insect and gangly as a spider, Duke Marco stood in the doorway dressed in black. In his hand was a church candle. His doublet could have been Tycho’s own. “P-pretty angel,” Marco said,
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