Jon Grimwood - The fallen blade

Or perhaps the first…

Raising his face to the full moon, Tycho let its rays wash over him and felt his dog teeth descend. Sinews tightened, bones twisted, muscles tore, his throat filling with his own blood. Touching fingers to his face, he found his ears had shrunk away and left knotted holes in their place. His nose was flatter, his nostrils wide like a hunting animal. However bad the krieghund looked, he looked far worse.

Inside Tycho's chest his heart froze, locking him into panic. Its beat was gone, his lungs were static, his breath disappearing. Only fear kept him upright. He was alive and dead in the same second.

"Sweet gods…"

Changing hurt more than he could imagine. A remorseless shriek of pain washing away his last dregs of being human.

This monstrous creature was what he'd become eventually. Tycho knew that for a fact. In the end, no matter how many times he reverted, this was how he would end. Monstrous and ugly. The world he'd been born into long dead. A new world in its place he could hardly bear.

His price for finally letting the beast free was that he'd spare the slaves. Because sparing them would prove to himself something human remained somewhere. And then Tycho stopped pretending he didn't want what came next and-as A'rial let her storm subside-became himself. The Mamluk galley had double rows of benches on both sides. The top row open to the sky, with a raised walkway used by the whip master. Tycho swallowed this information in a single second.

"Die, demon."

You had to give the Mamluk sergeant credit for courage. He must have known he was about to perish. Lobbing his head over the side, Tycho kicked his body into the slave well, and faced the soldier beyond. Spiked helmet, chain mail, a wickedly curved scimitar. Tycho noted and dismissed his armour and weaponry.

The man's first blow almost landed. His second one did, slicing Tycho's lower arm to the bone and sticking fast. Grabbing the man, Tycho squeezed; throat armour buckling as Tycho crushed his voice box.

Shock, then pain. Tycho knew the sequence.

Ripping free the scimitar, he hurled it at the next man and watched him stagger back, the weapon protruding from his chest. The cut on Tycho's arm was a memory. So he gave it to a man with a spear instead. The spear man gasping as Tycho touched a hand to his face. Staggering back, he clutched his healthy arm, screaming loudly. Tycho threw him over the side. The kettle drummer died as simply.

Tycho kept moving.

It was a whip that stopped him eventually.

An iron-tipped lash spun out of nowhere and slashed his face, blood dripping into his mouth. Sword deep, he could feel his teeth where his cheek should be. Turning swiftly, to protect himself from a second blow, he held his cheek's upper and lower edges together and jagged flesh begin to mend.

The third blow he was ready for.

Catching the weighted end, he wrapped the thong around his fist and yanked, dragging the whip master to his knees on the walkway in front of him. The Mamluk never stood a chance. As Tycho moved for the kill, a slave grabbed the whip master's ankle from below. Another hand snaked upwards, chains clanking.

The slaves held the man in place while Tycho popped his eyes with taloned thumbs and tossed him sideways into the slave pit.

He tossed the whip after.

Behind Tycho were archers he didn't remember killing. Mamluk sailors, their heads twisted so far they stared in the wrong direction. A ship's mate dead on the walkway, his throat torn out, eyes missing, his guts in a pile between his knees. Tycho's thumbs dripped blood, his doublet was sticky. At no point did it occur to him to use a dagger. At no point had there been a need.

The red edges of the world faded with that realisation.

And inside Tycho's chest his heart started beating, and his lungs shuddered and drew breath. Bones twisted and muscles contracted. As stars lost their brightness in the sky, the full moon changed from scarlet to a rose-pink, and the waves began to ebb and flow at close to their normal speed.

Tycho checked behind him.

Atilo's ship stood there. A'rial still on the prow. But her arms were no longer flung back and her face no longer turned to the sky. She was staring between ships, and Tycho saw her smile as their gazes locked.

Around them lay wreckage. Broken masts and spars, vast canvas jellyfish made from sails that held pockets of air. A rudder floated with a man at arms slumped across it, an arrow in his neck. Bodies bobbed like stunned fish, rising and falling with the swell. Most were ordinary sailors, Mamluk, Cypriot or Venetian. Those rich enough to own mail were on the seabed already.

Apart from Tycho, only one free man remained alive on the ship.

And maybe he was the only one really. Because Tycho doubted he was human, and was certainly not free. A slave to his hunger if nothing else.

The Mamluk admiral was young, tall, thin and brave.

He had to be brave to stand in the door of his tiny cabin. Elegant riveted mail glinted silvery gold in the moonshine, the brand he clutched highlighted the gold-filled etching of his helmet. He wore a rich helm with a jutting nose-piece, steel cheek protectors and a gilded spike at the top. A silver crescent arched up over his eyes. It was the armour of a Mamluk prince.

"Demon," the man said.

Firelight from his flaming brand rippled along the sharpened edge of his sword, revealing tightly hammered damascene. Steel had entered the young man's soul and stiffened his spine. It was revealed in his steady gaze. Tycho was impressed.

"What are you?"

The changes Tycho had fought against became less savage as his face finished shifting shape, his ears regrew, his nostrils closing. His teeth were the last to go, retreating into his upper jaw. They hurt as viciously as ever, but this time it was less frightening. Taking a step back, the Mamluk appeared more terrified by the man than he had been by Tycho's shifting shape only moments earlier.

"It can't be you," he protested.

In that second Tycho decided to spare him. At least for a while. "You know me?" he said. "You know who I am?"

A brief nod was his answer.

"Then you know more than I do," Tycho said. "Because I don't know you." Slowly the Mamluk undid his helmet.

And it was Tycho's turn to step back. Because the last time he'd seen that face, Sergeant Temujin was cutting its throat before burning an entire ship. At the start of Tycho's time in Venice, with no moon over the lagoon, and a Mamluk vessel freshly boarded by Dogana guards.

"You recognise me now?"

"I watched you die," Tycho said. "Saw your ship go up in flames."

The Mamluk closed his eyes, and his lips opened in prayer. He touched his hands to his heart, his mouth and his forehead in turn; in formal goodbye to someone. And then told Tycho who.

"My twin," he said. "She insisted."

"Insisted on what?"

"Accompanying your ship. It was stupid. But she was my father's favourite and he indulged her. Until you spoke, no one knew for certain she was dead. I could feel an emptiness in my heart but I couldn't lose hope. My father will be upset." From the way the young man said those words, much went unspoken.

Unbuckling his armour, the Mamluk dropped it at his feet, barely noticing it clatter down steps to fall into the slave well where oarsmen watched in silence. A single tug pulled fine mail over his head and he let that drop too. Reversing his scimitar, he offered it hilt first with a slight bow.

"Make it clean," he said. "And when I reach paradise I will beg for your release from the curse that afflicts you."

Tycho swung the scimitar experimentally.

A beautiful weapon, with its handle wrapped in a strand of gold wire, and a blade weighted so it carried on the down stroke, whistling as it cut through the air.