Jon Grimwood - The fallen blade

"Where are we going?"

"I have a house," he said.

"Ca' il Mauros?" Her heart sank. To reach there from here, they'd need to cross the Grand Canal by gondola twice, or walk round it, which would double the distance and take them down one of the most dangerous streets in Venice.

"A different house," he told her.

When he reached for her hand, it was not to comfort her, but to grip her wrist and start dragging. He wanted her to walk faster.

"Atilo, you're…" Giulietta shut her mouth. The old man was trying to save her. He was furious, in a way she'd never seen, his face a battle mask, his eyes hard in the darkness.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He stopped, and Giulietta thought… For a second, she thought he'd forget himself and slap her. Then there was no time to think more of that, because a grotesque figure watched them from a square ahead.

"This way."

A yank on her wrist hurled her towards an alley. Only that way out of the new square was blocked as well. As were the other two exits.

"Kill yourself," Atilo said.

Giulietta gaped at him.

"Not now, you little fool. If I'm dead, and they're dead…" He pointed to silhouettes appearing in the shadows. Some stood near the grotesques who blocked the exits, others stood on rooftops or balconies. "Don't let yourself be taken."

"They'll rape me?"

"You can survive that. What the Wolf Brothers do you don't survive. Although you might be more use to them alive and unharmed. Which means you must definitely kill yourself."

"Self-murder is a sin."

"Letting yourself be captured is a worse one."

"To God?"

"To Venice. Which is what matters." Serenissima, the name poets gave to the Serene Republic of Venice, was an inaccurate term. Since the city was neither serene nor, these days, a republic.

In Atilo's opinion, it was most like a bubbling pot into which some celestial threw endless grains of rice. And though each morning began with the bodies of beggars against walls, new born infants in back canals, paupers dumped to avoid the inconvenience of burying them-those unwanted, even by the unwanted-the city remained as crowded, and as packed, and as expensive, as he remembered it ever having been.

In summer the poor slept on roofs, on balconies or in the open air. When winter came, they crowded squalid tenements. They shat, copulated, fought and quarrelled in public, seen by other adults as well as by their own children. The stairwells of the tenements had a permanent odour of poverty. Unwashed, unloved, stinking of sewage, and a greasy misery that oiled the skin until it looked and smelt like wet leather.

A dozen scholars had drawn maps of Venice. Including a Chinese cartographer sent by the Great Khan, who'd heard of this capital with canals where roads should be and wanted to know how much of it was true. None of the maps were accurate, however, and half the streets had more than one name anyway.

Running through what he thought of Venice, Atilo il Mauros wondered, in retrospect, why he felt reluctant to leave it and the life he'd made here. Was it simply that this was not the way he'd intended to die? In a squalid campo, near a ramshackle church, because every campo had one of those. Although not usually this run-down. A church, a broken wellhead, ruined brick houses…

He'd hoped to die in his bed years from now.

His wife, beautifully stricken, backlit by a gentle autumn sun; a boy at the bed's foot, staring sorrowfully. To have this, of course, he'd need a wife. A wife, a son and heir, maybe a couple of daughters, if they weren't too much trouble.

After the siege of Tunis, Duke Marco III had offered him a deal. The duke would spare the city and Atilo would serve Venice as Admiral. If Atilo refused, every man, woman and child in the North African city would be slaughtered; including Atilo's own family. The great pirate of the Barbary Coast could turn traitor to those he loved and save them, or stay loyal and condemn them to death.

Bastard, Atilo thought with admiration.

Even now, decades later, he could remember his awe at the brutality of Marco's offer. In a single afternoon Atilo uttered the words that divorced his wife, renounced his children, converted his religion and bound him to Venice for life.

In taking the title of Lord Admiral of the Middle Sea, he had saved those who would hate him for the rest of their lives. In public, he'd been Marco III's adviser. In private he'd been the man's chief assassin. The enemy, who became his master, ended as his friend. Atilo would die for that man's niece.

This was the biggest gathering of Wolf Brothers in Atilo's lifetime-and he was shocked to discover so many in his city. Well, the city Atilo he'd come to love. Atilo knew what this battle meant. To fight krieghund in the open like this would destroy the Assassini, quite possibly leave him without an heir. Destroying the Assassini would leave Venice without protection.

Was her life worth that much?

He knew the girl behind him had caught the moment he wanted to slap her. Fifteen-year-old princesses were not meant to run away, unhappily betrothed or not. They were not meant to be able to run away. A savage whipping would await her if she lived; assuming Atilo told the truth about her flight. Alonzo would see to the whipping even if her aunt objected. For a woman so fond of poisoning her enemies Alexa could be very forgiving where her niece was concerned.

"My lord…"

A black-clad man appeared out of the darkness, sketched a quick bow and instinctively checked what weapons his chief was carrying. He relaxed slightly when he saw the little crossbow.

"Silver-tipped, my lord?"

"Obviously."

The man glanced at Giulietta, his eyes widening when he realised she carried Atilo's dagger.

"She has her orders," Atilo said. "Yours are to die protecting her."

There were twenty-one in the Scuola di Assassini, including Atilo. In the early days he'd given his followers Greek letters as names, but he drew his apprentices from the poorest levels of the city and many had trouble with their own alphabet. These days he used numbers instead.

The middle-aged man in front of him was No. 3.

No. 2 was in prison in Cyprus on charges that couldn't be proved; he would be released or simply disappear. Knowing Janus it would be the latter. No. 4 was in Vienna to kill Emperor Sigismund. A task he would probably fail. No. 7 guarded their headquarters. No. 13 was in Constantinople. And No. 17 was in Paris trying to poison a Valois princeling. In theory, only one of them needed to survive to ensure the scuola, the Scuola di Assassini, continued unbroken.

Sixteen Assassini against six enemies.

With those odds victory should be certain. But Atilo knew what was out there: the emperor's krieghund. His blades would die in reverse order. The most junior trying to exhaust the beasts so their seniors had a chance of success. Atilo was arbiter of what success entailed. Tonight it meant keeping Lady Giulietta out of enemy hands. "Go die," he ordered his deputy.

The man's grin disappeared into the night.

"Numerical," Atilo heard him shout, and hell opened as a snarling, silver-furred beast stalked into the square, leaving a screaming, vaguely man-shaped lump of meat in an alley mouth behind.

"What is it?" Giulietta asked, far too loudly.

"Krieghund," Atilo snapped. "Speak again and I'll gag you." Sighting his crossbow, he fired. But the beast swatted aside the silver bolt and turned on an Assassino approaching from its blind side. The kill was quick and brutal. A claw caught the side of the boy's skull, dragging him closer. A bite to the neck half removed his head.

"I thought they were a myth," Giulietta whispered, then clapped her hand over her mouth and backed away from Atilo.

The Moor grinned sourly. She was learning. Give him the girl for a few months and he'd give her aunt and uncle something worth keeping, and not just keeping alive. But they didn't want something to keep. They wanted something unbroken they could trade.