Jon Grimwood - The fallen blade

"Burn this boat."

Roderigo stared at his sergeant.

"Chief… Steal what you need to keep the Regent and duchess sweet and burn everything else. Him included. Because I know what that is and it cannot be tamed. The Khan owned one in my grandfather's time. It killed him."

"Sergeant."

Temujin stopped talking.

His eyes were bright with the onset of fever, and the crude bandage around his ribs dark with blood. Only willpower and his need to convince Roderigo kept him conscious.

"You want to tell me why you killed that man?"

It hurt Temujin, probably more than it hurt to drop to a crouch, but he did it anyway. Opening buttons at the dead Mamluk's neck he revealed the swell of breasts, and said, "She's got to be someone, chief. To command this ship and carry that."

Temujin meant her prisoner.

"We can't let anyone find her. And, believe me, you don't want anyone to find that. Kill it, fire this damn ship and get us out of here."

"I wish it was that simple."

"It is."

Roderigo shook his head.

Halfway across the lagoon, while the Dogana troop concentrated on getting their badly wounded sergeant to Dr. Crow for treatment, the boy made his move. He simply stood, and tipped backwards into the water with a splash.

"Kill him," Roderigo shouted.

Not a single man had his crossbow cocked.

By the time Bato slotted an arrow, his target was being swept away by the cross-currents that made Venice's lagoon so unpredictable. Had the burning Mamluk ship been close enough to light the scene Bato might have had a better chance. He fired anyway.

The shock of an arrow striking blew breath from the boy's body. And the pain in his shoulder opened the boy's mind to a vision that swept in like smoke.

In the smoke a veiled woman smiled, then scowled and began to protest as her image blew away, leaving him spitting water. When she reappeared, she was sitting on a squat throne with a thin young man in black clutching her knees.

"Join us."

"Where am I?" he asked.

She looked puzzled, as if this was not what he was meant to say.

But already he was thinking other things. Clutching at passing fragments of memory, he tried to recall why he'd been locked behind the false bulkhead of a ship. Fire and ice, earth and air. Fire started this. A blaze swept through some building. A man killed another. A sour-faced woman hated him worse than ever. He fought to remember who she was.

Who he was.

But the foul-tasting lagoon swallowed the boy before he could remember more than a single word: Bjornvin. The word made no more sense to him than his vision of the veiled woman. Since the men who hacked him free were heading in one direction, the boy let cross-currents sweep him in the other.

He wondered what would happen. He'd die, he supposed. Perhaps he should stop swimming to see how sinking felt?

Stopping kicking, the boy let his shackles pull him under.

And, tasting salt, let himself sink further. Opaque above, darkness below. His toes squelched on soft mud in a channel. Minor canals in Venice were cleared every ten years, waterways and large canals whenever necessary. He knew nothing of this. He simply felt softness beneath his toes.

Sinking deeper, he felt gravel.

His lungs pulled life from the water rushing into them.

Flickers of lightning twitched his limbs as fire lit behind his eyes and he felt his body fight itself, without understanding how it won the battle for life. Slamming into an ancient wreck, which crumbled as he snatched for it, he let a brutal undercurrent sweep him sideways before kicking for the surface.

The burning ship was far behind and buildings lined the horizon ahead of him. Above, in gaps between the clouds, was a bowl of stars. More stars than any man could count. Should he be able to count beyond his fingers.

The boy had reached the Grand Canal without knowing where it was, what it was or anything about it. As his eyes struggled to focus and his body shivered, and his guts retched filthy water, he accepted the embrace of an incoming tide. Then a spasm locked his stomach, and the sky became purple, the moon hurt his eyes, and bitterness filled his throat.

"There you are…"

The words were not his.

They came uninvited into his mind. With them an image of the woman he'd seen in his head earlier, when he was drowning. An old woman with a young woman's smile. A young woman with an old woman's eyes. Thin wisps of smoke across her face like a veil, which blew away as he stared harder.

"Alexa?" he said.

"Who told you my name?"

Having no answer, he felt her try to pull clues from his ruined memories. All she found were the names others had once called him.

"White hair is descriptive. You is a pronoun. Tadsi is an Old Norse pun on shit, and Tychet means idiot. Here we've Latinised it to Tycho." She sounded darkly amused. "Keep the last. It suits you."

Tycho forced her voice away.

Moonlight glimmered on the Canalasso, the elegant waterway bisecting the city to which the burning ship had delivered Tycho. It glimmered in blanket-sized scraps of silver leaf. And the reflection this glimmering created lit the walls of a fish market opposite. But the three children staring down the slimy steps at the edge of the Grand Canal saw none of this beauty.

They were concentrating on a tidal area, beside the steps, where flotsam gathered. Tonight's catch was a drowned girl, long silver hair rippling in the gentle waves.

"Get her then."

Rosalyn guessed Josh meant her. Since she was the one he glared at. Hooking her smock to her hips, she stepped into the filthy water. "It's cold."

"Just do it."

Corpses could be sold, Josh said.

Necromancers, probably. Rosalyn couldn't see who else might want one. She gasped as the water climbed her thighs, realised she still couldn't reach the floating girl and stepped down again, grabbing hair. "Give me a hand then," she protested.

When Josh didn't move, her brother Pietro did, wading into the canal to help her drag the body nearer the steps.

"My God," Rosalyn said.

Scowling, Josh came to take a look.

A boy, his genitals flopping sideways, his chest entirely flat, his belly button an intricate coil. If not for the belly button, he could have been an angel with his wings cut off. She'd never seen anyone so beautiful.

"He's been shot."

"As if that matters."

She yanked the arrow free anyway.

"We can't sell that," Josh snapped. "What's round his wrist?"

Rosalyn dropped to a crouch, seeing her moonlit reflection in the metal's surface. "A shackle, some of it's silver."

"Don't be stupid. No one would…"

Shuffling closer, Rosalyn snapped her knees shut. She didn't like the way Josh was leering at her. After a second, she knelt.

His temper had never been good. After that night in Cannaregio, when they hid in a tanner's pit while demons fought, it was worse. He was less forgiving each day of what had happened to her with the Watch. Maybe, her gut relaxed slightly at the hope, this would keep him happy. The dead boy was pale and very dead, with a ring of ruined flesh where his shackle scraped bone.

"What's so interesting?"

Her guts locked again. "Look," she said. The blood trickling from his arrow wound was blackish, its exact colour hard to determine in the darkness.

"So he's foreign." Turning to Pietro, Josh said, "Give her your knife… And you, stop pissing around and chop off his hand."

This was a test, Rosalyn knew it was. Josh spent most of his time telling her she was too stupid to live on her wits like him. Her brother was coming to believe it too. "I'll cut off the shackle."

There, she'd failed. As he expected her to.

"Rosalyn…"